Lital Levy

Princeton University

Lital Levy is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University. She is an interdisciplinary scholar of Comparative Literature, Jewish Studies, and Middle Eastern Studies. Her research is concentrated in three areas: the culture of Israel/Palestine, the historical and contemporary experiences of Middle Eastern Jewish (Sephardi, Mizrahi, and Arab Jewish) communities, and theoretical issues of comparison, representation, and language (such as translation, literary multilingualism, literary vernaculars, world literature, and cross-cultural comparison). Her work is about breaking down boundaries, be they conceptual, disciplinary, or institutional in nature.

Lital obtained her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from UC Berkeley in 2007 and spent three years as a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. Her first book, Poetic Trespass: Writing between Hebrew and Arabic in Israel/Palestine (Princeton UP, 2014), was awarded the Jordan Schnitzer Award in the category of Jewish literature and linguistics (2012-2014) from the Association for Jewish Studies, the Salo Baron Prize from the American Academy of Jewish Research for the best first book in Jewish studies, and the MLA First Book Prize.